Being Present

The following anecdote from Alton Lee (with Dynamic Catholic) is a great example of being present to another:

A few years ago, I got a collect call from a jail. The lady calling said her name was Laura, and I had never met her before in my life. When she realized it was the wrong person, she halfheartedly asked me if I would bail her out.  Now, it would have been really easy for me to hang up, but I felt the Holy Spirit prompting, and instead asked her to tell me about her life. Over the next few weeks I would get these five-minute collect phone calls from Laura where I would learn about her life.

One day that I was praying about Laura, trying to discern if I should bail her out or not, she called me while I was praying, and I agreed to bail her out for $720. I never met Laura in real life, but I could tell that her life changed in a genuine way. She moved in with her sister, reconnected with her daughter, and she wrote this lovely note to my wife and I thanking us for bailing her out.  In the letter, she said, “That $720 cash was priceless. You've given me my life back. I was so lost and now I'm found.”

In Christ, Ken.

He or She?

"If God Is Gender-Fluid, Why Not Call Her a ‘She’?" is the title of an online article by Elizabeth Childs Kelly in Medium.

Following is the comment I posted in reply:

If you are of no particular religious persuasion, you can certainly refer to whatever you imagine as god in whatever way you wish. If professing to be Christian, not so. It is not a matter of God’s gender — as spirit, God has no gender and thus is not a matter of being both or even being “transgender” [as Kelly suggests].

However, Christians have God’s own revelation of himself as male, i.e. Father. (Though He can be spoken of as having qualities considered by humans to be masculine or feminine.) Per C. S Lewis: “…Christians think that God himself has taught us how to speak of him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument… against Christianity.” 

And there is this thought from Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI): “Christianity is not a philosophical speculation; it is not a construction of our mind. Christianity is not ‘our’ work; it is a Revelation; it is a message that has been consigned to us, and we have no right to reconstruct it as we like or choose. Consequently, we are not authorized to change the Our Father into an Our Mother: the symbolism employed by Jesus is irreversible; it is based on the same Man-God relationship he came to reveal to us.”

In Christ, Ken.